Tormenting Telemarketers

At 800Notes, “Slim” writes:

Yes, more things need to be done.
A good call blocker prevents second (and subsequent calls) from the same number.

Only for that phone(s) with the call blocker. Not the other millions of phone lines targeted by telemarketers. I think that’s an important distinction. I just don’t see everyone purchasing a call blocking phone and maintaining call block list as a scalable solution. At best it’s a stop-gap measure. And the autodialers already scale up outbound calls in order to attempt keeping each live agent is engaged in a call, so more blocking will result in autodialers making even more calls/second. Already it’s not uncommon for a campaign to make millions of calls per day. And of course, caller id spoofing is becoming more common as an anti-blocking measure, further reducing it’s effectiveness.

With my VoIP provider, I can call 1,000,000 numbers for about $2,500 (full minute billing) assuming every call is answered. If most are blocked, out of service, or just don’t answer that cost goes down even further. 6-second billing, and it goes down even more. If I get a portion of CNAM dipping fees ($500/1M calls of common), I can actually profit with this campaign without selling a single product. And I can easily accomplish this with a autodialer. With this business model, call blockers aren’t the solution, they become part of the problem. The autodialer/robocall platform can pay for itself. It’s no longer an expense, but an asset.

Answered calls transferred to human agents (answered using a auto-response bot on your side, putting a DTMF 1 into your voice mail greeting to trick the robocall to transfer, manually answering the call, etc) actually cause most outbound campaigns to throttle the outbound call volume in order to increase the probability of answered calls having an available agent to transfer to. So each answered call can create a net reduction in the number of outbound calls made over time. Keeping the agents busy keeps more people from being called. Literally the more calls that go unanswered directly relates in an increasing number of calls placed in order to keep the limited number of agents busy. They are the telemarketers weakest link.

NoMoRobo used to mess with them but he actually started feeling sorry for them:

This summer we tried messing with them hard but, I too ended up feeling really guilty. The people at the other end of the line are really just trying to make a living. It’s their bosses that are the scumbags.
When we pulled back from harassing them and instead just setup dumb situations, that got really fun.

They did post a couple of videos them doing that.

Frankly, I don’t care what techniques are used to deal with the calls – but anything that increases the number of calls completing transfers to their live agents (which are required to complete sales), the better. It reduces calls, and reduces their revenue (hence their profit margin). This can be either a new class of call “blockers”, more activity like this by NoMoRobo, or just more individuals that are just tired of passive solutions. The more their agents spend on non-productive calls, the more it eats into their revenue – and their profit margin.